Moments
by arcanelegacy
Summary: Life is the sum of a million moments. For Chris Redfield, the important moments are the ones he remembers. Even if he's not sure how or why he remembers them.  Pre- and Post-RE5; mentions Claire, STARS, and Jill. Definitely Jill.


**Disclaimer: Any and all things** not immediately recognizable as a registered trademark of Capcom's probably belong to me. Anything you do recognize as belonging to Capcom I am simply borrowing for the time being. I seek no monetary gain from this. I only wrote it for fun.

**Summary: **Life is the sum of a million moments. For Chris Redfield, the important moments are the ones he remembers. Even if he's not sure how or why he remembers them.

**Rating: **K

**Author's Note: **This was inspired by a conversation I had with Galatea23 over on Livejournal. It's been sitting on my hard drive for the past few months, but I finally decided to dust it off and finish it. I'm still not a hundred percent sold on the ending, so I might be going back and making some edits at some point in the near or not-so-near future. In the meantime, enjoy!

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**Moments**

Chris Redfield doesn't know all the little details about how his memory works. Science – especially biology – was never his strong suit. But to him, those little details aren't all that important either. Because it's the moments that make up his life, not the way his brain stores them or retrieves them, that matter the most.

There was the moment of his birth – which was on this list because he actually remembered it, being born. He remembered the lights and the brightness and the shapes of the world, none of it really distinct, none of it in color, none of it with words, but there nonetheless.

Later, there was the moment Claire was born, a little red and wrinkly creature that screamed and cried and accidentally hit him in the head with her tiny fist. In that moment, funnily enough, he had decided he hated her. It wasn't until another moment, a few years later, when Claire was following him around in the backyard and came across a garter snake and for _him_ to come and help her, that he realized he loved her and would do anything to protect her.

Even if it was just from harmless garter snakes.

There were more moments in middle school and high school, though they blurred together in his mind until they were little more than a mess of moments. Like the moment he turned his paper over and saw his first D. Or the thrill of his first moments behind the wheel of a car. And the sense of freedom he felt the moment he pulled out of the driveway alone for the first time.

Then there were his moments at college – the moments of awkwardness and unease. And when he'd signed up for the Air Force, and how much better he'd felt after that. And after those, there were the big moments. The painful moments, like when it finally hit him that his parents were gone, permanently gone. With that came the moment he became both a brother and a parent to his little sister Claire, and all the moments he spent struggling with finances and burial fees and bills – the moments he spent convinced he was going to drown. There was a brief moment of joy when he sealed up the last box for Claire to take to school with her, and another when he saw her off to college, and another when he first pulled up at the S.T.A.R.S. office in Raccoon City, ready to start over.

There were the moments he met the others, Wesker and Brad and Forest and Rebecca and _Jill_.

And then the moments got dark and blurred together. They became a nightmare, an endless, ceaseless dream. A hundred thousand moments spent in that mansion, broken down into moments spent finding lifeless bodies lying in pools of blood, moments spent fighting undead bodies that moaned and shuffled and lunged with startling speed, moments spent wondering if he'd live to see another day and then realizing he _had_ to – for Jill, for Claire, for Barry and Brad and Rebecca and Forest and Kevin and Enrico and Richard, for _everyone_ – and moments spent vowing to _destroy_ the men and women who thought it was okay to fuck up lives like this.

There were the moments when he said, again and again and again, that he would put a stop to what they were doing, no matter what it took. The moments he spent staring hard up at his ceiling, trapped in thoughts.

Then there was the moment he lost Jill, a moment that had hung frozen for a lifetime and burned itself onto his memory. After that, when everything came crashing down around him, the moments were filled with pain and grief and anguish and all piled one on top of the other like dead weights.

Near as he can remember, the moments after that were almost all about her: finding her. Saving her. She couldn't be dead; there was no body. She had to be out there. Jill wouldn't go down without a fight.

That culminated in the moment he found her again; the moment he realized that that was _her_ in that image. That was Jill, through all the grain and the fuzz and the pixilation. She _was_ alive.

And he had to go find her.

The moment he did would live on in his memory forever. The moments that followed had been full of heartbreak and rage and desperation, feelings that had only finally ended when he had held her in his arms, felt the warmth of her body, and knew that she was going to be okay.

And then there was _this_ moment, full of exhaustion and relief and fatigue and the tiniest spark of happiness, happiness that grew in the next moment, when he turned and caught Jill's eye and saw her smile for the first time in an eternity of moments.

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**Author's Note:** Oh, hey, look. I am alive. My apologies for my long absence - a massive amount of writer's block coupled with a very busy summer schedule left me with little time to think, much less write. (This fic, for instance, sat on my hard drive for probably eight months at least before I finally finished it a month ago and forgot about it. Yeah, it's been that kind of year for me.) I'm hoping that now that I'm back in the creative environment of school I'll be able to write again in and around some of my coursework.

This fic was inspired by a video created for the WNYC show RadioLab. I don't know if any of you are fans, but if you aren't you should check it out. Jad and Robert make science as fun as it was in third grade, and they're hilarious to boot. Anyway, the video was about moments and how we articulate what a moment is. Words failed, so they turned to video. Me, I like words. So I tried it out with this fic.


End file.
